


Thy Bed of Crimson Joy

by Weeping_Rubies



Category: Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), Dracula - Bram Stoker
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Dysfunctional Relationships, Eventual Smut, F/M, Loss of Identity, Romance, Vampires
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-18
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-16 03:39:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28824600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Weeping_Rubies/pseuds/Weeping_Rubies
Summary: A narrowly averted tragedy forces Vlad Dracula's true identity out into the open, before he or Mina are ready for it. Mina struggles with her identity after a torrent of memories wash over her.  Vlad knows she loves him, so why is she so reluctant to join him in eternal life?His long, fine hair falls over her and she smooths it back so she can see his expression. His eyes are as blue as she's ever seen them and his mouth works a little before he speaks.“I would have died for this moment,” Vlad whispers. “I would have killed for it.”
Relationships: Count Dracula/Elisabeta, Dracula & Mina Murray, Dracula/Mina Harker, Prince Vlad/Mina Murray
Comments: 5
Kudos: 13





	1. Chapter 1

Letting Mina Murray come to him at her own pace was torture. It turns the sleepless days Vlad Dracula meets with her into joyful but maddening centuries. 

She sits across from him in an elegant tearoom, one that he had rented out so they could have at least the appearance of privacy while having the nominal chaperonage of their silent servers. 

It is nearing time for them to part, and the silence between them often deepens as the goodbye approaches. 

A crease appears between Mina Murray’s elegant brows as she studies him across a small table covered in linen. She fiddles with her delicate midnight blue teacup and halts abruptly, schooling her hands into stillness. 

Vlad Dracula waits for her to say something, to explain her furrowed brow. Asking about her troubled expression would only result in her denial of anything being wrong. If he demanded an answer from her, the way he wanted to? She had given him a vivid lesson when he pressed her about her feelings during their second meeting. Mina stormed away from him, uncaring of the stares she drew. He commanded her back to him, bending her fierce will under his, and it had cost him the clarity of her presence. Her defiance had also brought his hunger swarming over him, which he could not entertain. 

He could taste her feelings to solve the mystery of her expression. It is dangerous, this urge to experience her feelings and thoughts. He often finds warmth and desire in her, alongside a chorus of outrage and bitter resistance shouting down the tender feelings. He has commanded storms for centuries, but he cannot calm the storm that ravages her. 

His frustration gives way to a cold fury at their situation, but dissolves when he hears it. A faint rasping sound comes from under the table. Mina rubs a piece of her silk skirt between her fingers. Elisabeta had only ever fidgeted in public when exhausted or overwhelmed. This is his princess reborn, and the need to comfort her is visceral. He slouches a little in his seat, instead of reaching for her.

If only he could make her see how they once were: husband and wife, prince and princess. How much he wants her by his side, as she is now, forever. They are owed the reunion that seems forever in coming.

“Are you well today, Prince?” Mina says, and delicate blue veins in her forehead stand out, telegraphing her worry. 

“I am just deprived of sleep—a lifelong affliction, I am afraid,” he says. He smiles at her and he feels her response, a rush of heat through her body. Her delicate scent comes to him—a mix of sunlight on young green leaves and her honeysuckle perfume. 

“I’m happy to hear that,” she says, “I worried that you were coming down with something.”

Oh, no. He cannot let that go, her trying to shape her feelings into something more acceptable, like maternal warmth and fussing. “If I were sick with anything, it would be only with longing.”

“Do you ever stop flirting?” She covers her mouth with her hand, but she laughs, warm and present instead of remote and troubled.

“Only when I am sleeping, which I rarely do these days.” Because the arduous process of wooing his wife during daylight hours---now as radiant, sharp-witted, difficult Mina--- left him little time to sleep. 

“I would imagine it’s a nasty habit of yours, but I’ll make an allowance for it in you,” she teases. “I enjoy your company, Prince Vlad of Székely, if not your commitment to flirting.” 

She rises and pulls on her leaf green leather gloves. Her movements are brisk, but not overly so. 

“Please allow me to escort you to the train station,” Vlad says, rising in one fluid motion. 

Once outside the tearoom, he offers his arm, and she reaches for him. She drops her hand with reluctance. One day soon, she will take his arm when offered. She will blossom under his touch.

“If you would like to,” Mina says. Vlad risks a taste of her emotions and finds only gladness at his offer.

They stroll towards the train station. Vlad projects a warning to all in their path to not jostle or impede their progress, and the pedestrians pass around them with a comfortable distance, unheard of on London’s teeming streets. He has trouble projecting his will today, and it is hard to not offer his arm again to bring her closer, to make her safer. Tomorrow they are not meeting. Things will be easier with a night of unbridled bloodshed and a day of sleep.

They arrive at the train station too soon. The sun is only a bright disc behind the eternally cloudy skies, sinking into the west.

They say goodbye, and she turns from him. Her dress with its outdated bustle troubles him. He will free her of constraints and second-hand clothes. 

“I will see you at the museum Thursday morning,” Vlad says, if only to force her warm attention back to him again. 

She keeps walking, but smiles back at him over her shoulder. And then it happens. 

She stumbles, then tries to force herself upright, and nearly falls. A tall, thin man reaches out to keep her from falling, and she flinches away from the stranger’s grasp. 

Vlad sees it all… the way she wobbles closer to the edge of the platform. In that instant, he sees the broken body of Elisabeta, overlaid by a vision of Mina, dead and bleeding on the polished iron tracks. Faster than the eye can follow, he streaks forward to catch her around the waist. 

As he crushes her small, beloved form against him, he cannot help himself. His face shifts once to the one that Elisabeta used to kiss with passion and affection. Then his face changes back to the one Mina knows, the face she gives soft smiles and sharp measuring looks to. And then his face transforms a third time… into the face he has vowed to never again let her see while she lives as a mortal woman; the one with blood-red eyes and sharp fangs curving down. Her face shows startled recognition and love and then fear. She recognizes him at last. She sobs and throws her arms around his neck. 

Terror and joy give him the strength he needs to will both of them away from the crowd.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mina struggles with devastating revelations, alone.

Mina gasps into Vlad Dracula’s neck at the impact of their arrival, as color and sound assault her senses after the horrific blankness of their journey. She doesn’t struggle away from him, though she should. Instead, she clings to him fiercely while he strokes her hair. If they stay like this, she doesn’t have to confront any truth beyond being held. They could be any man and woman locked in an embrace after receiving tragic news. But terrible news, even the very worst, must still be faced. 

She pulls away, and his crimson stained eyes meet hers, and she looks beyond the frightening, huge fangs. She sees the man that doggedly wooed her despite her prickly demeanor, the husband she knows he had been to her. The love that she’s refused to acknowledge overwhelms her, so she lifts her face and kisses his dangerous mouth.

He doesn’t return the kiss, but his eyes remain fixed on hers until his face crumples, and bloody tears leak from his eyes. Vlad lifts her in his arms like a bride before she can react. He carries her to a bench and deposits her there… and disappears in a howling, storm-dark whirl. 

Mina collapses onto the bench and slowly recognizes her surroundings. She’s in the farthest reach of the Hillingham gardens. She rolls over, her face upturned to the coming twilight. She’s grateful for the solid stone under her back and hands. A blessed woolen numbness steals over her. 

She considers the facts to impose some order on what she knows. The facts are slippery and disorderly; she can believe them only because of the truth of it coming from deep beyond her bones, beyond her very self. 

The foreign prince she had fallen in love with was a dangerous, murderous creature of myth---one that she recognizes from the penny dreadfuls Lucy had shared with her. This creature had once been a man: the husband who anchored her; the husband she loved beyond all reason. 

He fled from me like I am the most dangerous thing in the world, Mina thinks. She supposes she might very well be dangerous to him.

He had left her. He rejected her trembling kiss and disappeared without a word of comfort or promise of return. 

The numbness immediately deserts her as the abandonment pierces her heart. She rolls over onto her stomach and covers her face with her hands, her fingernails biting into the soft flesh above her brows as she fights her roiling grief and anger. 

Images without sound invade her mind. She sees Vlad as he had been in life: wearing red armor and fiercely kissing her goodbye, despite the crowd of priests. She sees herself… no… she sees Elisabeta, reading the report of her prince’s death. Elisabeta paces back and forth before a window, just filling with light. Elisabeta hurls herself through the window, into the glorious, indifferent dawn. And then she is Elisabeta, clawing at the air to stop her fall as she tumbles and twists, screams torn from her as she crashes into the dark waters of the Arges river. She’s still conscious as the waters close over her, her body so broken she can’t fight her way to the surface, the pain from her sheared flesh and shattered bones endless as the icy water replaces air in her lungs and finally, darkness. 

She is Mina once more, whole and unbroken physically, and shattered just the same. 

Hours pass before she pushes herself up from the bench where she had howled out her grief and rage. Her face stings, and she presses her fingers above her eyebrows, discovering flakes of dried blood. Her scalp burns like fire, and she finds her hair down and tangled. 

She vaguely remembers clawing into her face to keep from crying. She doesn’t remember snatching hair from her own scalp, but she must have done so, because there are small bald patches on her head which burn when she touches them. Her face feels hot and heavy, and she can draw in only the tiniest, most useless, whistling breath through one side of her nose. She starts towards the house, finds herself off kilter, and crouches to claw at the buttons which fasten her boots. Finally, she yanks off her boots and throws them down. She staggers to the house panting and shoeless, her feet protected only by torn black stockings. 

She yanks open the octagonal doors to Lucy’s room and a brief scream escapes from Lucy before she seizes Mina in her arms. “Mina, what happened? Who did this to you? What happened?”

Mina considers the truth and hurls it away from her. “I had an accident. I just need some water and—”

But Lucy is already calling for bandages, brandy and clean clothes. She guides Mina to the bathroom and helps her undress, drawing scalding water for a bath while insisting Mina drink the brandy. Mina hates brandy, but this time, she drinks it without protest. Then Mina lowers herself into the bath. Lucy washes Mina’s wounds and dabs them all with alcohol. Lucy exclaims over each crescent-shaped mark on Mina’s forehead. After the bath, Lucy dresses Mina like a child, pulling a night gown over Mina’s head and guiding Mina’s heavy, unresisting arms into the sleeves. 

Mina stumbles back to Lucy’s bedroom, and eases herself onto the huge, ostentatious bed, telling Lucy as much of the truth as she can stand to tell.

“I fell in love with someone else. He saved me from an accident. And now I don’t know if I will ever see him again.” Or if I even want to see him. 

“That’s where you’ve been, these past 3 weeks, out with your new beau?” Lucy says, incredulous. “He’s why you’ve been weeping every morning? Don’t deny it, I heard you. I assumed you were heartbroken over Jonathan’s staying on with that foreign duke—”

“He stayed on with a count, Lucy,” Mina couldn’t help correcting her friend out of long habit. “No, though I cried for him, too. I couldn’t bear the turmoil and recently, I didn’t know if I could break it off when he returns. Now I do. If Jonathan Harker were in front of me, I would give him back his ring. And I don’t know if I can ever be happy again. Or if I can ever trust myself again. I’m an inconstant woman, whatever else I am.” 

“Mina, that’s positively ridiculous,” Lucy pauses, and holds her quietly for several moments. “If you fell in love with someone else, it would be only because that you love this man more than Jonathan. Now, what happened, did you have a row?”

“Not exactly. He saved me from an accident… and I kissed him. He held me in his arms when we returned here, and then he left me without a word.”

“You kissed him?” Lucy wore the same delighted expression Mina had seen hundreds of times before when Mina had flouted some rule or another. 

“Yes.”

“Oh, Mina. There’s hope for you after all.” Lucy pauses. “Still, what a cad to leave you in this state!”

“It’s not like that, Lucy. We were both… overwrought. He will return, I know it,” Mina told Lucy firmly, clamping down on the anger that ignites in her at the thought of seeing Vlad again. “It’s just….”

“Just what?” Lucy asks.

“It’s just I’ve changed so much during the past few weeks, and then this accident happens. I don’t know how much more I can take.” Mina sobs into her friend’s neck, then suddenly pulls away and retches from the force of her feelings. Lucy rubs her back until she regains control of herself. 

At midnight, Mina insists on returning to her own bed, where she will try to sleep with the gas lamps lit. She has never been afraid of the dark, but tonight... What would she see painted upon the darkness as she stares into it, with no hope of sleep?

Contradictory feelings roar through her as she tries to understand him. The deep, burning sense of abandonment snatches her breath away and grief forces her throat closed as effectively as a rough stone hand pressing down on her neck. Anger floods her, alongside her soul-deep yearning to be with him despite her anger and grief. 

Who could she possibly be now that she knows what he is? Who could he be to her, monster that he surely was?

But would a monster be able to look at her with such defeat and despair? Wouldn’t a monster have claimed her, right there in the garden under the wide dome of the sky?

He’d had plans. He had drawn her out so carefully. He adjusted whenever she balked at his behavior, becoming less imperious, wooing her more and demanding far less as the weeks went on. He had been changing, just as she had relented, tolerated, and finally welcomed his company. 

There is a deep rupture in herself that she only half understands. The convention and propriety that once buttressed her have shredded like rotted cloth under a gleaming knife. The entirety of her life, the certainty in it, is nothing. The pain of having it yanked away from her—she can only really contemplate it in the abstract. Even abstracted, the pain threatens her with sharp teeth and unending sadness. 

The revelation of what he was so suddenly… Wouldn’t it be as devastating to him as it was to her? For the imperious, commanding prince to be unmasked, and laid bare before her had to be torture. Leaving her alone wasn’t the right thing. Maybe it was understandable. 

She has the sense that if he would just come back, just hold her and allow himself to be held, that they could heal each other a little. She needs to bury her hands in his hair and kiss his soft, repentant mouth. She only remembers snatches of what it was like to seize his mouth in passion, and to grasp his shoulders as if she was drowning. She shivers even while flushing with heat. 

She drifts into sleep, still trying to understand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> New chapter will be up next Saturday 02/06/21 or Sunday 02/07/21. Vlad is very much a vampire and he's not going to be quietly contemplating events. No, he's going work out his angst in a bloody fashion.


End file.
